I've never understood why some random company is allowed to arbitrate the domain registration and make $$$ out of it. Feels like it's kinda not in the spirit of the internet.
You pay an upfront fee to ICANN and probably some kind of recurring tax and you get to create a TLD. You then sell this TLD for higher prices than ICANN and run a very simple service that processes the transactions.
You then take anything lower than a 5 or 6 letter domain that is a word in the english language and define it as a "premium" domain and charge obscene prices for those domains. The fee you charge for the domain based on this system is recurring. So instead of buying milk.com for $10k and selling it for $12k you already own milk.blog by default and if someone wants to register it you charge $500 a year.
NOT TO MENTION this whole system is like a slap in the face to a certain kind of "domainers." People who buy domains based on their perceived value, park them, and then try and resell them for more money. There are many millions of dollars wrapped up in this other, also stupid racket. These companies got so bold as to get their domains "valued" and then bet on the value of their company based on their holdings like some type of stock filled with mortgages. This new system is like cutting directly into that strategy but I guess ICANN gets some of the money this way.
It's a shame they don't determine that the domain was squatted before your trademark existed. But it seems in their interest to give the benefit of the doubt to the one buying many, many domains yearly.
If Tucows is willing to sell they certainly aren't publicizing it.
After the gTLD explosion I thought I could finally snare a decent one but they all went into the $1000+ category immediately, excepting niches like cook.republican, cook.accountant etc.
Luckily some did eventually come down, I managed to get cook.run for a more reasonable $50/year
firstname.party is great to have.
Sounds great to me.
I don't see it as necessary, to be honest, and given the frequency with which people lose access to their wallets/have them stolen, I'm not entirely sure the bulk of domain owners would want bearer instruments to be the sole way to manage (or lose) their domain.
Namecoin is probably the largest, and provides .bit. IPFS has IPNS, but that is just subdirectories of a user hash, there is no pretty naming there.
There is also tech like what is behind .onion, where you can generate names until you get one you like, where you can devote more resources to getting prettier names at the cost of electricity and hardware to do so.
"Unlike DNS, GNS does not rely on central root zones or authorities. Instead any user administers his own root and can can create arbitrary name value mappings. Furthermore users can delegate resolution to other users' zones just like DNS NS records do. Zones are uniquely identified via public keys and resource records are signed using the corresponding public key. Delegation to another user's zone is done using special PKEY records and petnames. A petname is a name that can be freely chosen by the user. This results in non-unique name-value mappings as www.bob.gnu to one user might be www.friend.gnu for someone else."
The latter is the really corrupt, broken thing here, and we should be able to swap that out.
But I understand your point and the whole system is rotten. First come first served is no longer viable.
Public auctions for each new and released domain might have merit, but will still attract domainers and preclude many fresh companies.
What are the plebs gonna do? Go the the non existent alternative?
Browsers/OS would be reasonably easy in most circumstances, but there are embedded devices, load-balancing configurations, other esoteric uses for DNS (text records, mail etc) that'd have to be considered as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
There are others. But no, they don't become the new standard.
There certainly is the issue that most of these TLDs aren't very interesting to most people, though. With low demand, I certainly understand why they want to be able to milk the few names that people find attractive.